jasura

Has anybody tried just brute forcing this encounter and (more or less) healing through the damage? We started out with the 4 corners method with the whole group kiting doomfires but had problems with people not getting healed, tank dying etc. so we tried just stacking healers (10 healers) and going in and more or less healing through all of the damage.

We haven't killed archi with this strat yet but after a few full days of attempts, we got him down in the 50% region multiple times.

When a doomfire spawns, we just more or less sidestep it. It will arc back into melee quite often but they just move and/or we heal them through it. We have 5 shamans so tremor totem in every group really helps... But otherwise, DPS was fine and we were beating the enrage timer. We had multiple ranged dps sitting there putting out more than 1000 DPS and avoiding most if not all damage.

 

Dominus

I'm sure it's possible, but the thing I don't like about that strat is the fact that there is already enough room to get really, really bad combos where death is hard to avoid. The fact that you are purposefully staying in damage is going to make these things occur much more frequently (I've personally been gripped, bursted, and when dropping from the burst, had no choice but to land in a doomfire because clicking my tears earlier would've had me taking quite a bit of fall damage...I lived because cloak was up, but imagine if I was already low from doomfire damage, and was a class without a 1 min get out of jail card).

That and the fact that should this happen to a person whose soul charge includes the silence, and you're going to have even more charges to deal with when people hit with doomfire aren't healed.

 

Chirality

I again disagree. If done properly melee should *not* assume that Doomfire is going towards them simply because it spawned nearby. Of course they should look for rogue doomfires wandering around, but melee is the vast majority of damage on this fight and the safest place to be, at least in my guild. If people always run straight back from doomfire it will be *very very* rare to see melee get hurt.

 

Tyrian

If you go to Archimonde weekly and feel like your rolling the dice 10-20 times before you get lucky enough to kill him - your guild and its members will get frustrated - and you waste alot of time that could be spent in BT/Sunwell instead.

Its really a personal matter for guilds to decide what works and is most appropriate for them: A risky all-or-nothing brute force type approach, or a more slow-safe-and-steady atittude. Any method can kill Archimonde, but whether its consistently repeatable might be a different story - and thats very important when you need to fit in BT/Sunwell progression raids as well, instead of resort to rolling the dice for 2-3 hours to kill him weekly.

I should add though, in our current 1.5-2 day raiding week - I actually dont mind wiping on Archimonde/Illidan a couple times. They really are good, fun fights - and its nice to savour them for a couple attempts rather than finish it in 6 minutes and log off to play alts for the rest of the night. A bunch of other raiders in my guild have similar sentiment to this too

 

Harne

As others already mentioned, you take a big risk using the "heal through it" approach. One of our most common sources of death on this fight is probably having someone get the Doomfire DOT and then get airbursted off out of range of heals. This combination frequently results in a death/soul charge which then begins the chain reaction. It doesn't take very much falling damage to finish you off when you already lost life to the Airburst and the first few ticks of Doomfire.

I would recommend picking a strategy that focuses on minimizing damage and just remember that it is going to take practice. If you can make it to the enrage timer alive, you can worry about doing more dps on the next attempt. (And in my experience, making it to the enrage without just killing him is pretty difficult unless you lose a lot of people early without wiping. ) This is one of those frustrating fights where everything will be going smoothly and someone will die to something stupid at 30% and you'll wipe. The more practice people have, the less likely they are to make those dumb mistakes.

 

shabee

Well, what is wrong with "if I see a doomfire coming even *close* to me, I pay attention to it. Cancel my cast and get the fuck out of its way" approach?

Random or not, don't fight with doomfire, because when you two collides, it is always you who lose.

 

shabee

I think I had been 1shot by doomfire once, with about 7k HP.

 

Chirality

What we're discussing here is not simply "running away from doomfire" but "minimizing the raid-wide impact of doomfire". That means that people shouldn't simply run or strafe out of doomfire (and thus point it to the raid) but run backwards so that it stays from other people. To that end, I think it's a bad plan to simply tell people to simply 'get out of the way' and encourage a non-optimal strategy.

 

jasura

Thanks for the feedback guys . By the way, we have our people wear stam gear on this... 10k minimum HP, 11k+ preferred. This gives the healers a bit of a cushion.

We haven't really been doing this purposefully but that's what it's devolved towards. We don't intentionally take damage but we can heal through it more than any other methods. What I meant by "Brute forcing it" is that our ranged don't really kite the doomfires that much. They really just sidestep it and let it do it's thing. Sometimes it'll go straight back away from raid, other times it goes into melee...

It also must be understood that we are a caster heavy guild. We have 4 excellent destro locks (And 1 aff lock), 4 spriests, 4 mages, elemental shammy. Our casters do almost as much DPS as our melee on this fight. One lock (Our former GM and an excellent player) was able to put out more than 1200 DPS consistently and never died once to doomfire.

 

shabee

My guild's strategy is to move as a group. So if a fire comes toward you or your groupmate, doesn't matter how doomfire moves, you follow the designated raid symbol in your group.

So most of the time, there are always healers on MT.

And since you move with your group, there isn't any worries about being separated from group, dying from curse or doomfire's DOT damage. (We make sure that there is a de-curser in each group)

Oh location wise, we use the 4 corner(or call it a cross? Depends on how you look at it) strategy.

Group3
|
|
Group2 ==== MT ==== Group4
|
|
Group5

oh and MT stands in the wood in the middle of the field. It seems the doomfire won't extend to group2.

 

Mawanello

My guild and I would like to thank the above posters for their useful feedback on this encounter.

We had our very first kill yesterday on our second night of attempts, using the four corners strat described by shabee: 4 (ranged) groups, at least a decurser for each group (we had 4 mages and 2 druids in our raid), and healers (2 druids, 2 priests, 3 paladins and 2 shamans) evenly distributed among groups, to ensure MT healing under almost every circumstance.

All I can say is brute forcing the encounter seems just a pure luck based strat, it can work maybe once but is not repeatable; instead, as many have already stressed, being overly cautious is really the key here: watch out for doomfires, especially when fear cooldown is about to expire, use your tears relatively early then bandage to full health before going back to your assigned position, equip and use wisely (that is, when you risk being feared into a doomfire) the 2 minutes pvp insignia.
We killed Archimonde with 3 minutes to spare in the enrage timer, no one died during the whole inc.

We had our shadow priests fear ward (even dropping shadow form if possible to rebuff it) our shamans who promptly dropped tremor totems to dispel their feared group members (mostly healers).

 

Fragged

Personally I think the biggest problems with increasing the number of doomfires that head towards melee is that there's really no safe way for melee to get back in range, inevitably you have to cross the doomfire spawn threshold twice (once to flee, once to reenter) the more your melee has to flee from the doomfires, the more damage they will take from it (and sometimes you inevitably will get combos like doomfire running back in hits 3 melee, then the melee are all airbursted away, ...)

It's certainly something I'd expect that you can do, I just wouldn't expect that strategy to have as much reliability.

 

Anedris

Melee should never get doomfired running back in - just wait for him to cast one and then go (listen for the emotes).

(They may get hit going out though, since they can't afford to wait for an opening if there's a fire heading their way.)

 

shabee

Unless you are unlucky and get a circled doomfire that endangers your melee, our melee group never leaves boss alone.

DPS warrior can intercept back while being airbusted into air.

So they don't lose DPS time.

 

Fragged

You missed the context I was replying to I guess - the person I was replying to was forcing their melee to flee from doomfires (that were curving at melee) more often by actively sidestepping and allowing doomfires to turn back towards their melee group. I was merely pointing out that if you force the melee to run out, both on the run out and on the run back in there is a very real risk of eating a freshly spawned doomfire while crossing the threshold.

 

cheebamonkey

You're assuming doomfire are in fact kiteble. The basics of doomfire that I don't think have any room for debate are:

doomfires always start at a certain range out from the boss, lets say 20 yards
doomfire cannot change directions quicker than a 90 degree turn
doomfires always start moving radialy out from archimonde after being cast.

Given these parameters kiting the doomfires is more likely an illusion than anything else. I don't doubt that if you programed something to do this and then let it loose you would see almost exactly what you see every raid with doomfire. This is why I say melee should assume every doomfire will come towards them, so they get into the habit of keeping an eye on every doomfire regardless of where it spawns or where it appears to be going at first glance.

 

Zurgat

We do it slightly different.
Basically we run in from the buff spot, and the tank keeps archimonde where they meet.
Group 1 is standing left of the stump, group 2 somewhat north of archimonde.
Group 3 furthest away from the buff spot, and group 4 left of where we started.

It's working quite decently so far, but due to random luck and fires killing people we haven't gotten past 49% yet.
We have confidence that he's going down soon though.

We have a druid standing with Group 5 for decursing the melee.

-= Random Ravings - RSS Feed =- Rogue and Hunter stuff here. As well as guides to get you trough your spare time.

 

Vanadi

On our second night of tries we got him down. It was pretty easy as long as people focus on surviving more then anything else. His enrage timer is easy and if your decursers are fast they can easily make it so that the healers end up bored because besides the occasional doomfired person there won't be much raid healing needed.

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y23...archimonde.jpg is how I made the starting positioning, after a while the raid will stand different due to doomfires. The groups are a global idea and the black spots are decursers (we had 6 yesterday although only 4 actually ended up decursing). Just make sure to keep stressing your raid about survival being more important then everything else. Every wipe we had yesterday was basically caused by individual mistakes. People not reacting to doomfires fast enough, messing up the air bursts (as in dying to fall dmg). Also tell everyone to equip a pvp trinket to break bad fears and try to stack shamans if you are having diffculties. We ran with 2 resto shamans, 1 enhance, 1 elemental which is our usual setup shaman wise and it really trivialized fears.

ps: Make sure to tell your shamans to bloodlust before he actually reaches 10%! I was silly enough to have them save it and then find out the immunity buff works for bloodlust as well.

 

Narishma

Having your back to the Well of Eternity spells wipe if you get some unlucky airbursts on healers.

 

Vanadi

In 2 nights of tries we didn't have a single person (healer/ranged) who ever got knocked into the WoE. The actual distance on the screenshot seems a bit messed up though and it looks alot closer then it actually is. Although I will turn it around if it ever happens.

 

• Daboran

If you read the whole of this thread I think you'll find the mechanics of Doomfires are pretty much accepted to be "semi-intelligent". They are not completely random, but are assumed to be basically a "mob" with a frontal aggro cone that changes focus target regularly and possibly also has a random direction change element (the "heatseeker missile" analogy).
I've regularly kited doomfires through 180degree turns then back through another 180degrees in the opposite direction to complete a full 360. To say they are completely random is extremely unlikely to be a true statement given their behaviour.

 

Tyrian

Im pretty much in full agreeance with how you described the workings of the doomfires. It really jdoes ust seem like an invisable Thaledred mob with a frontal agro-cone and randomly alternates between picking a frontal-target-to-follow then random-direction-movement phases.

 

Valerys

Any confirmation yet on whether the mountain climbing was nerfed or not?

 

Delrain

It was. There is now an invisible wall that blocks all the mountains around Archimonde as well as some of the "field". Basically, it blocks you from getting onto most of the grey(rock) terrain so you have to now buff from the field. We haven't run Hyjal yet this week so I am not sure what effect the wall will have on doomfires or on airbursted people who hit it.

 

Masimo

Our guild has had Archimonde on farm for a couple months now, and last night instead of the usualy 2hr clear, we ended up wiping on Arch for 2 hours as it seemed some changes have been made to his hitbox and airburst range (speculation) that changed the fight for the melee classes a bit.

Soon as I picked up Arch and positioned him, the rogues noticed his hitbox was bigger than usual. On the usual Arch kill, I (MT) do not stand max range, I position myself right inside the range that Doomfires can spawn so that they do not spawn on top of me. Melee positions the same way, grouped up right behind him. I have NEVER gotten Airbursted with the melee using that positioning, and it helps melee and MT avoid Doomfires spawning on him.

Last night, we noticed that if the melee and MT weren't at max range, MT would get airbursted with the melee. Melee and MT had to stand max range behind Arch and with the larger hitbox this put everyone pretty far out. This lead to more melee deaths since Doomfires would spawn on top of them and more MT deaths for the same reason. Granted, healing MT through Doomfires is not the hardest thing to do, but it was unexpected damage.

We usually 1 shot Archimonde, but this was a combination of an unexpected change and "one of those nights". Did anyone else clear Arch after the patch went live and notice this? Is Airbursts range bigger?